Citalis Reviews

Crashed twice during tutorial. Every time it asked you to build a park it would crash every time.

This games pretty fun for a couple hours. It's incredibly simple, though. You have to manage your towns happiness by making/upgrading your businesses, building more and more houses, keeping your water supply high enough, and having "Beauty". Beauty is where I think the game fails. All you do is buy a park district and fill that thing up with trees whenever you need more beauty. There's no strategy or anything, it's just incredibly tedious. Still, the games worth the low cost to play it for a couple hours then never touch it again.

The game is fairly simple, but I find the art style charming and the gameplay relaxing. The videos on the store page provide a very accurate explanation of what the gameplay is like. I would say it has a learning curve of about 5-10 minutes. The developer is actively involved on the forums, which is nice to see. I would love to see more additions to the game in the future, like more options for house and park tiles as well as more game modes with specific goals. My only complaint is the music - I disabled it after a couple minutes but it is so repetitive that it is currently burned into my brain.

Pretty steep learning curve, and not very forgiving--be prepared to go bankrupt 20 times in the hour it takes you to get the hang of this game (Protip: You can't demolish buildings. Make zero mistakes when building). The tutorial doesn't really explain much and there's nothing stopping you from spending money you don't have and immediately going bankrupt. Similar games simply tell you that you can't afford it, and don't allow you to purchase the thing. The UI isn't super intuitive--there are mysterious buttons and coloured bars that fill up and I couldn't tell when a loan payment was due. They don't explain the 'days' mechanic at all, and I learned on my own that building houses in a 'park' district, severely diminishes it's purpose (by like 90%), but I hadn't realized that until I had filled up half of the district with houses. Again, you can't demolish buildings. Ended up finally paying back the $10M, and what do you get? Font that reads "You Win" and the option to stop playing, or keep playing. Not sure what I expected, but I'm still a little disappointed. Confetti maybe? An original artpiece? It really feels like an unfinished (or at least unpolished) game, but it has a great deal of potential. A buck fifty was about right for this I guess. I got 3 hours out of it. That's 50 cents per hour of entertainment--and that's if they don't add anything else to it like additional goals or upgradable housing or new park modules, which they should totally do.

This game has potential. Fixing the bugs and many many crashes could prove pivotal toward getting it anywhere.

Simple concept, very limited options in term of gameplay and quite repetitive. You'll get around 1-2 hours of fun for about 1,50€ so you can decide if it's worth it, I certenly enjoyed it and hope for a little more variation in future versions.

[h1]Interesting idea, but needs refinement[/h1] Only played for 15 minutes but it was enough to tell where this game was going. There are some interesting mechanics, but they aren't balanced well and can outright contradict each other basically preventing your game from continuing on. Problems: - Confusing: The only explanation you get before you start the game is a giant mass of text, some confusing control descriptions, and a tutorial like 'clippy' that just says "Build residences. Ok. Now build businesses". Took me 2 games to figure out that the only way to gain money is by clicking the profit bar of each business. There isn't any indication of how much water or beauty you need; it just starts plummeting and you have to address it. Also, there is no warning when it starts dropping, you have to see that yourself. - Building Balance: One house gets you +500 population but one business employs 35 people at the start, yes you can expand the businesses to have them match, but it seems rather strange. I believe it would have been more intuitive if you upgrade/build housing in parallel to building/upgrading businesses. - Crime mechanic: Still not sure where crime comes from, it just happens to do either businesses or population. But the worst thing is that as crime climbs, it is also climbing individually within each business and if it maxes out that business is locked until you "pay off the police". Only problem with that is that businesses are the only thing that gives you money (apparently your city doesn't believe in taxes) so it can quickly lock out your revenue stream, leaving you with a beautiful, crime free, water abundant, populated city without any open businesses and no way for you to build/unlock other businesses. - Water? I still don't understand the water mechanic. I get that the water requirement rises with population but the whole locking of reservoirsI don't understand. The amount of water in an individual reservoir never seems to go down, so you can unlock and add more if you need it, but why? It seems to be just another percentage that you need to be aware of and add more water if you need it. - Money: Businesses are the only way for your city to make money. To get that money you have to click on each individual business and then click it's profit bar. This is pointlessly tedious and monotonous. I don't know if the idea was to keep the player active and not just watching money increase, but at the very least have an icon appear above the building that we can click on when the profit bar is full. That would at least save us a click. I already mentioned how you can be locked out of getting any more money, essentially game over, so another revenue stream, as in taxes from residences, would go a long way. Overall, there seems to be some interesting micro-city building ideas here. I liked the customization of the buildings and the general art style, but the mechanics need balance and refinement. Maybe have housing have a similar upgrade path and population contribution that businesses have. Alerts for downward trending water and upward crime would do a ton to help the playability of the game. Until the balance issues are addressed, I cannot recommend this game. - p.s. This is a purely subjective personal opinion, but as I have an interest in urban planning I find the choice to isolate housing, businesses, and parks into districts a strange design choice. Even the art style of them being separate floating island enforces the isolation.

Citalis is a novel approach to citybuilding without the need for positioning, roads, etc. This can work. Citalis falls flat though; It has boring mechanics like the arbitrary need for "beauty" and water - which are not resources, they're build-it-once and forget. And it has pointlessly punishing mechanics like the need to "lock" a water resevoir before it overflows, when the water is never consumed so it's just a little mini-game while it builds. The lack of interesting game mechanics result in a tedious and boring game. Furthermore, once you reach a certain level of success, the game does not push you to build a bigger city. The loan payments, the only way to lose the game, cap at $12,000, which means that building a city bigger than that will guarantee the win if you wait about ten minutes. Citalis could have been so much more - the idea is okay, but the execution falls flat. I bought it after it was recommended by Extra Credits, and it wasn't worth it at all.

Well, this is a really delicated review and I saw a bunch of negative reviews, which I think they have interesting points, but to negativate this game it seems a bit unfair. To sum, I do recommend this game. Once said that, here's what I think: [list] [*]First of all, this game NEEDS an achievement system. It's not something that "would be nice", it's a thing that MUST exist. Citalis is a great game of micromanaging a very simple system of income and outcome, but it makes with huge proportions if you play a bit more than 30min. So, without an achievement system, the player works with it own personal records only (and that's so frustraiting). Without it, the whole "missions" thing fall to the ground. There is no reward feeling in spending 1~2 hours trying to make the best city to beat the game on Hardest because there is nothing to reward; [*]The price (U$1,00~U$2,00) is absolutely fair; [*]The art of the game is pretty, balanced and warming; [*]It should have more than one track of music (but this is not that important); [*]The engine is too much clicking and need much more hotkeys. At some point of the game, you have more than a 250 slots of things to construct and/or demolish and/or upgrade, and the only way to do so is selecting and doing by mouse clicks. There's way too few hotkeys. Not even Enter/Return works at info windows. Need to build something? Click. Where? Click. Are you sure? Click on the Ok Button. And so on for demolish and everything. It's exausting and I don't think that is the point of the game. The water lock/unlock, though, you can switch with hotkey "L" (and it feels so good). [/list] This game has just be released and, as it says, is Casual and Indie. So, congrats to the devs. They made a very nice work on this game. I do have faith that Citalis will growth as a great game, but it need this improvements so urgent. I'm not hypocrit: I think that if the game improve a bunch of things that I mentioned, it must raise it's price, but it needs improvements (raising the price or not). [h1]Conclusion: [b]8.6[/b]/10[/h1]

In its current state, I cannot recommend this game. I thought this game was about building a city and expanding the floating islands while growing the city. But it's a whole lot simpler than that. Basically you have 3 districts: business, residential and recreation. These three need to be filled with resp. businesses, houses and trees while maintaining a balance between them. That's all there is to it. Nothing more. Paying back the initial loan becomes a waiting game, if you have filled up all of your islands. I don't understand the loan at all. If it was a loan, I should have been able to access that money, but that is not the case. There is no interest rate, so the daily payback does not decrease while the sum of the loan decreases. It's way too simple in its current state. I really hope this game gets the attention it deserves from the developers, to make it a really good and fun game. I will not refund it, because I think the devs can do it.